Probus Smart Things: IoT Based Platform Simplifying Smart Grid Automation!

One of the most common and important forms of energy, electricity dominates major activities and livelihood. It plays a crucial role in driving economic growth and social development. Thus, the per capita power consumption tells about the pace at which a country is developing. In the past decade, India has made impressive progress in its per capita consumption of electricity with the help of digital technologies and innovations.

However, the mass adoption and deployment of these cutting edge technologies is an uphill task and requires a big-budget. Giving thoughts to reducing the cost and complexities in structuring a systematic smart electricity grid, a team of technocrats set up an integrated end-to-end IoT-based platform called Probus Smart Things. The idea was to help utility providers digitize their distribution grid and have a clear visibility of their network. This grid-automation startup is the brainchild of Anand Mohan Singh, Ahmad Raza, Rahul Mishra, Sunny Kumar and Ankit Vaish. They envisioned a future for India where the Smart Grid Vision, generating and distributing more efficient power and boosting the growth of the nation’s electricity sector, will not be a tough assignment.

Probus Smart Things was one of the twelve startups shortlisted for the sixth edition of the Qualcomm Design in India Challenge (QDIC 2021). The Qualcomm Design in India Challenge is an initiative by Qualcomm started in 2016 that encourages and supports design houses and product companies to design and develop innovative hardware product designs incorporating Qualcomm SoCs platforms and technologies. The challenge spurred innovation in 5G use cases and mobile edge-compute. The startup received benefits like a financial grant of INR 3.2 lakh, access to the Commercialization Fund (ICF) of 60 lakhs, comprehensive guidance and mentoring from industry leaders, which helped the team to enhance their technology solutions.

“Probus is using Qualcomm chipset in its product since its inception. We get high performance in our application areas of substation monitoring where Probus monitors not only grid load, and energy consumption, but also the health of the transformer such as temperature inside transformers, oil level inside transformers, bus bar temperatures, vibration, and humidity level. In the QDIC program, Probus strengthened its product robustness by redesigning its gateway module with a host of features incorporating BLE, ethernet, GPS, and GSM all in a single module. In addition, Probus received connect with industry-specific VCs and mentorship to revamp GTM and the partnership model,” said Anand Mohan Singh and Rahul Mishra, Co-founders of Probus Smart Things.This New-Delhi-based startup’s smart meter is fashioned to communicate using RF Mesh technology that makes remote reading, billing, and managing of the reliable last-mile power distribution connectivity grid smooth and easy. Probus Smart Things’ IoT-based solutions help in achieving an efficient electricity grid. The startup pioneered innovations like end-to-end modular sub-station monitoring & automation solution, wireless systems, and modular plug & play architecture. Probus Smart Things’ “Made in India” inventions are categorized under:

• Hardware: A high-quality industrial sensors installed on assets such as distribution sub-station, consumer meters, LT ACBs and LT Feeders. This comes with high-speed 4G, Bluetooth low energy security network, and RF Mesh 865-868MHz.
• Cloud Platform: This unique analytic platform supports all network data, event based alert generation, and preventive maintenance based on historical data. The platform can handle more than 3.5 million end points.
• Enterprise Field Force Application: One-of-a-kind application that enables ticket-based field force tracking, real-time event generation from field assets and management of maintenance activities.

Their analytics dashboard facilitates Condition-based maintenance, Continuous asset monitoring, Real-time information, Alarms generated based on alerts from assets, and continuous asset data capturing for relational analytics. The hardware and software work to cut back electricity usage and wastage helps to track periodic equipment failures and provide real-time visibility on asset performance.

Probus Smart Things’s achievements are as spectacular as its inventions. The startup has served big wheels of the industry, including Adani, TATA Power, BSES, North East Utility and many others. It has aslo integrated its technology with Genus, HPL, Iskraemeco and other meter manufacturers to scale and deploy fast. The startup has won Deloitte Fast 50 technology company award, Aegis Graham Bell award, ISGF award, Assocham top 20 innovation award, and winner of India round of Seedstars World 2019, representing the country at the Seedstars Asia Summit. It has bagged a whopping $600,000 seed funding round led by Unicorn India Ventures. The company’s revenue has grown 6X in last 2 years and plans to grow 8X in current financial year.

Under RDSS Scheme, released by GoI last year, government plans to make every household/industrial meter smart. Probus is at the forefront of it, enabling with its proprietary RF-mesh communication technology to make the existing meters smart as well as deploy in new smart meters. Probus is aiming to connect 1 million end points with its IoT platform in next 8 months.

Probus Smart Things remains at the forefront in accomplishing the Government’s plan of making every household/industrial meter smart. With its proprietary RF-mesh communication technology, the company is making the existing meters smart and deploying new smart meters. For the time to come, Probus is aiming to connect 1 million end points with its IoT platform.

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